Laughter and the Eco-Horror Film: The Troma Solution Part I: The Toxic Avenger

Beginning in the 1980s, Troma Studios has turned monstrous nature on its head, playing campy yet subversive eco-themes for laughs by showcasing comic eco-heroes instead of the tragic hero of most horror films. Troma’s Toxic Avenger series from 1984, 1989, and 2000, and Class of Nuke ‘Em High and its sequels, from 1986-2013, look at toxic waste dumping, energy overconsumption, and radiation poisoning from a more comic perspective than 1970s eco-horror movies like Soylent Green and Silent Running. 

In these films, rugged individualism is replaced with more communal approaches to solving ecological problems. But Troma films move beyond traditional comic horror films by exploiting, satirizing, and sometimes parodying historical and current events with help from the laugh-inducing antics of a bumbling comic eco-hero. In The Toxic Avenger and Class of Nuke ‘Em High films, toxic waste and radiation contamination disasters are played for both laughs and results.

As comic eco-horror, The Toxic Avenger (1984) uses the negative repercussions of toxic waste for comic effect. To accentuate both its comedy and eco-message, the film’s hero, Melvin (Mark Torgi), mutates into the Toxic Avenger (Mitch Cohen) after being humiliated by a clique of vicious jocks at the health club where he works as a custodian. The jocks not only terrorize Melvin, the “mopboy”; they also gleefully seek out other victims with their souped-up car. They repeatedly run their car over a child on a bike and point a shotgun at a baby, for example. 

Ultimately, though, they chase Melvin through a health club window into the vat of toxic waste that changes him into a superhero. So the Toxic Avenger’s gory revenge seems just. To heighten his moral standing, the Toxic Avenger saves those in distress, destroys corrupt politicians, and is rewarded with a beautiful blind girlfriend. The message here supports a community free of those who exploit the weak. 

The film’s take on nature may seem less clear cut because toxic waste—an environmental pollutant—causes Melvin’s transformation into The Toxic Avenger and prompts the moral readjustment of Tromaville. Yet Nature seems to fight back in the Toxic Avenger films, since exploited figure turned comic hero Melvin destroys the power-hungry.

Horror and Thriller Films in Illinois

Today I started researching horror and thriller films set in Illinois and directed by Illinois filmmakers for our 2017 Embarras Valley Film Festival. This festival showcases filmmakers and folks in the film business from Central and Southern Illinois primarily. And our 2017 theme is thriller/horror films that will be shown the weekend before Halloween.

We co-sponsored Stay the Sweet by Quincy Joyner several years ago, so I knew we could begin with that one. But I know other local filmmakers have directed independent horror films, some of them set at the Ashmore Estates pictured above. Michael Savinsky directed Rag Doll back in 2011, for example, with one of my film students, Tyson Kroening, assisting and acting as a corpse.  

I plan to explore more thrillers and horror films set in Illinois. For now, though, I have a short list of Illinois directors of more professional horror and thriller films:

Manny Velazquez, Savage High (2015)/I Recorded a Murder! (2016)
David Ayer, Suicide Squad (2016)
John Carl Butler?
William Friedken, The Exorcist. Bug. Killer Joe
Reginald Hudlin, Marshall, Django Unchained
Mark Romanek, Never Let Me Go
Lee Sholem, The Doomsday Machine
 Robert Zemeckis, Monster House, Death Becomes Her
 Edward Zwick, Jack Reacher: Never Go Back
Gregg Toland (cinematographer)/William Wyler (director), Dead End?

The Hellstrom Chronicle: Turning insects into monsters

With the 1971 Academy Award for Best Documentary, The Hellstrom Chronicle connects amazing micro-documentary footage with a horrific voice-over from fictional character, Dr. Hellstrom (Lawrence Pressman). The film’s faux documentary stance, however, is complicated by its confusing rhetorical message. It warns of mass elimination due to environmentally disastrous practices performed by insects at the micro-level. But it also suggests their survival will not be threatened. Such a complex perspective may draw on the expertise of the documentary’s filmmakers: Co-director and co-cinematographer Walon Green also co-wrote the screenplay for Sam Peckinpah’s hyper-violent The Wild Bunch (1969). The documentary’s screenwriter David Seltzer was also the author of The Omen (1976) and Prophecy (1979), and the producer, David L. Wolper, also produced Appointment with Destiny (1971), a pseudo-documentary television series. The series used grainy film stock and chiaroscuro lighting to simulate the appearance of actual documentary footage from pre-cinema eras to enhance episodes such as one highlighting the shootout at the O.K. Corral.

Reviews of Hellstrom were also mixed, primarily because the film combined a fictional narrator with authentic documentary footage. Roger Ebert states for example that the film “has hypnotically fascinating color photography of insects. The camera becomes so intimate with insects, indeed, that at times we are actually in bed with copulating spiders …. Precisely because the photography of insects is so astonishingly good, the narration is annoying.” DVD reviewer Glenn Erickson maintains that the film “has top-level docu credentials” and “uses excellent footage of insect life” but also thinks the voiceover weakens the film.

Perhaps in an attempt to warn humanity about the negative consequences of their own exploitation of the natural world, the film constructs insects as monsters first by highlighting characteristics that Stephen R. Kellert suggests promote fear in humans. But those traits may also draw on the qualities shared by the most horrific versions of ourselves. According to Kellert, insects have “vastly different ecological strategies, spatially and temporally.” They rely on an “extraordinary multiplicity” rather than “individual identity and selfhood,” and their “shapes and forms appear ‘monstrous’” (quoted in Brown xi). But insects are also “often associated with notions of mindlessness and an absence of feeling,” as with the link between insects and madness, a link that explicitly connects the insect and human worlds. And they also possess a radical “autonomy … from human will and control” (Kellert quoted in Brown xi), a disposition also associated with humans who resist subjugation. Their incredible fecundity seems to generate the most fear in humans, according to Kellert, a stereotype associated with some humans, as well.

By emphasizing these fear-inducing characteristics, the film seems not only to warn humanity about insects seeming invulnerability, but also to attribute their possible dominance on Earth to humanity’s own mistreatment of the natural world. If we continue to destroy our environment, the film suggests, our species will be usurped by the insect world. Despite the film’s attempts to separate humans and insects, however, its narrative and film footage suggest insects will inherit the earth not because they are superior to humans but because they are just like us.

Ultimately, insects become monstrous in The Hellstrom Chronicle because they resemble humans at their worst, as, what Eric C. Brown calls “humanity’s Other” (xi). Drawing on all levels of anthropomorphism proposed by Persson et al., the film constructs insects as monsters by highlighting their primitive psychological qualities, their connection to human folk-psychology, their traits and “dispositions,” the social roles they play, and the emotions they both display and produce.

Toxic Avenger and Class of Nuke 'Em High as Comic Eco-Horror: in Images

2017 Association for the Study of Literature and The Environment Conference

Twelfth ASLE Biennial Conference
Rust/Resistance: Works of Recovery

June 20-24, 2017
Wayne State University, Detroit MI

ASLE 2017 Preliminary Program (PDF)
Conference Web Site
Registration is now open online:  REGISTER NOW
ASLE 2017 Registration Information
Registration form 2017
Registration fee is $160 through April 28, and $80 through April 28 for students, independent scholars, freelance artists and writers, and retirees. After April 28 all rates will increase by $25.
Pre-registration for workshops and seminars is now open.  Read the descriptions and how to pre-register.  Note: You do not need to be a presenter to sign up for a workshop or seminar.

Special Activities and Events:

• Banquet and dance at the Charles H. Wright Museum of African American History
• Special panels and presentations, including one on water + activism in Detroit, a special ASLE-Grant funded walking tour panel, “Articulating Detroit,” and a presentation by the 2015 and 2016 Community Grant winners on their projects.
• Field trip options, including the Belle Isle Aquarium Laboratory and Field Station, Arab American National Museum, an Urban Garden Tour, cycling tour, and volunteer opportunities
• Progressive evening in Midtown Detroit, including music, a radical poetry reading at Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit (MoCAD), and other artistic endeavors.
• Special movie screening of Watermark at the Detroit Film Theater at the Detroit Institute of Arts

The University and the City

Founded in 1868, Wayne State University is a nationally recognized metropolitan research institution offering more than 380 academic programs through 13 schools and colleges to more than 27,000 students. Wayne State’s main campus in Midtown Detroit comprises 100 buildings over 200 acres. WSU is home to students from nearly every state and 60 countries — the most diverse student body among Michigan’s 15 public universities.

A large urban redevelopment movement is taking place in the city. Detroit has the look and feel of a big city when it comes to things to see and do, but the community spirit of a much smaller town, which makes the city unique. Detroit is a thriving cultural hub, and there are numerous historical and architectural masterpieces concentrated in family-friendly neighborhoods within walking distance of Wayne State University. The campus itself is located in Detroit’s Cultural Center and is surrounded by museums, galleries, theatres, restaurants, and other attractions. To learn more about Wayne State and attractions and activities in Detroit, see http://wayne.edu/culture/detroit/

Enchanted (2007) and Interdependence in Animated and Live-Action World

As an animated comic evolutionary narrative Enchanted responds to the series of animated fairy tale features that have been part of Disney fare since 1937’s Snow White. In Enchanted, as in Snow White, Sleeping Beauty, and Cinderella, the female protagonist, Giselle (Amy Adams), follows a comic evolutionary narrative that maintains an interdependent relationship with nonhuman nature.

In the animated space of the film’s opening, forest animals from blue birds to rabbits and an owl follow the pattern of the earlier Disney films and help prepare her for marriage by replicating the figure of a prince (James Marsden) whom Giselle encounters in the forest and then, after she and the prince are engaged, coifing her hair and dress on the way to the wedding. 

In the live-action world Giselle enters when pushed into a well, she establishes a similar interdependent relationship with nonhuman nature, but she is now in an urban setting and summons pigeons, rats, and cockroaches instead of woodland creatures when she hums her working song. The animals help her clean her new friend’s (Patrick Dempsy) apartment in a scene that comically points out the ridiculous nature of this conceit.

When mice and bunnies become rats and cockroaches, they no longer meet the “cute” standard of Disney films, but they serve a similar ludicrous role—serving a Princess-in-Waiting by cleaning her house and sewing her clothing.

Yet in Enchanted, nature and culture, nonhuman and human nature, meet head on and, in fantasy, demonstrate the effectiveness of comic evolutionary narratives based in interdependent relationships. Enchanted demonstrates how a mix of animation and live action may also point to the necessary alliance between the worlds of nature and culture.